JULIE BEUGIN

SOFT OBSTACLES

12 APRIL – 18 MAY 2019

"Soft Obstacles", 2018, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 55" x 53"
"Soft Obstacles", 2018, acrylic and pencil on canvas, 55" x 53"

“Suspense in fiction is created through narrative obstacles, problems that create a kind of pleasurable delay in the resolution of a plot. In the exhibition Soft Obstacles, I create complications and obstacles in the reading of the painted surface. By abstracting from my photographic collages of spaces in the city, I give the paintings an underlying premeditated structure alongside their intuitive materiality. Large translucent brush marks give an impression of movement and a feeling of the fleeting and transitory. By cutting and overlaying painted fragments I recombine one moment with another, and the finished works hinge on the simultaneity of the fixed and the fluid, absence and presence. They do not read as completely intuitive paintings, but at the same time the degree of abstraction leaves the original source material always out of the frame. Through this, along with white voids of unpainted space and areas covered with collaged fragments of past paintings, I create obstacles in the reading of the apparently simple and direct gestures. A sense of suspense; of withheld or not-known information, accompanies an open-ended complexity of space, where structures of the painting hover on different planes and surface and depth fluctuate.”

– Julie Beugin

Beugin holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from Concordia University, Montreal. Her work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions across Canada in Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal. Beugin is the recipient of grants from the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts, and in 2009 she was shortlisted for the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition. She currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Julie Beugin would like to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

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